EL-RON OF THE CITY OF BRASS

L. Sprague de Camp

[Printed in the "Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers"series in Fantastic, August 1975]

ON NIGHTS 566 to 578, Shahrazad entertained her sultan with the tale of the City of Brass. She told how a Caliph sent an expedition under Emir Musa to explore in Africa. There they found a vast deserted castle, a jinn imprisoned in a pillar, and finally the City of Brass itself, with its people lying dead in the streets and houses.

The expedition gathered a load of loose treasure, met a friendly black tribe, and at last returned in triumph. There is sentimental Arabic poetry about the shortness of life, which causes hearers to weep or swoon. There are quaint gaffes about the events of the Days of Ignorance - that is, times before Muhammad. Thus we read of such pseudo-historic personages as "Darius the Greek, king of Alexandria."

On the whole, the tale is not of Shahrazad's best. Perhaps stories of Sindbad, just preceding, had drained her faculties.

The deaths of the folk of the City of Brass, for instance, are never explained. But then, as we go
back in time, we find that in fiction generally, inconsistencies, non sequiturs, and untied loose ends become more and more frequent. We are much fussier about such things than they were in medieval Egypt, where the Thousand and One Nights took form.

The City of Brass became the springboard for one of a series of fantasy novels in John W. Campbell's great, lamented Unknown (Worlds) by one of imaginative fiction's most colorful practitioners, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard - writer, entertainer, warrior, adventurer, and cultist. In the four and a half years of Unknown's existence, L. Ron Hubbard furnished eight fantasy novels for this magazine, one as "René Lafayette," the rest under his own name. Of these eight, three can surely be classed as heroic fantasy, while the fourth is on the borderline. A fifth appeared later in another magazine.

Such a contribution ranks Hubbard among the literary swordsmen and sorcerers. In his case, however, the cult leader overshadows the fantasy writer. The swordplay and sorcery experienced by his heroes are no more fantastic than Hubbard's own career.

WHEN I FIRST knew Hubbard, around 1940, his background was picturesque but not mysterious. He was born in 1911 in Nebraska, the son of a commander in the U.S. Navy. As a child he lived in Montana on a ranch owned by his grandfather and went to high school in Helena. Later, the family brought him to Washington, D.C., where he attended a YMCA preparatory school and, for a brief period ending in 1932, George Washington University.

During the next five years, Hubbard tried several occupations. He served a hitch in the Marines. He seems to have visited the Far East, either during his Marine service or earlier when his father served a tour of duty in those parts. Hubbard played the banjo and sang on the radio in California. He had some flying experience. He organized a vacation cruise to the Caribbean Islands. At a gathering in New York, he met H. P. Lovecraft probably on the latter's last visit, in January, 1936). Afterwards, Lovecraft said: "That is a remarkable young man!" 1

Hubbard wrote a Western novel, Buckskin Brigade, which appeared in 1937 and was quickly followed by more Western and sea stories. Next year, he broke into Campbell's Astounding and blossomed into a mass-production writer. His stories appeared in nearly all the science-fiction magazines and in other outlets for popular fiction. He wrote under his own name and under the pseudonyms "René Lafayette" and "Kurt von Rachen." For several years before Pearl Harbor, he compared in volume and versatility with Robert E. Howard at the peak of his production.

In his late twenties, Hubbard was a tall, well-built man with bright red hair, a pale complexion, and a long-nosed face that gave him the look of a reincarnated Pan. He arranged in his New York apartment a curtained inclosure the size of a telephone booth, lit by a blue light bulb, in which he could work fast without distraction.

During the winters of 1939-40 and 1940-41, Hubbard lived in an apartment on New York's upper West Side. His wife and two children remained in Seattle, whither he returned for his summers. He had a boat on Puget Sound and made cruises up the foggy coast of British Columbia and the Alaskan panhandle. On one such voyage, while he and a friend were oil their way to some fishing, Hubbard lassoed a large brown bear, which he espied swimming. The bear climbed aboard, forcing Hubbard and his companion to flee to the cabin until the ship ran aground and the bear departed. Fletcher Pratt used the incident in Chapter xxvi of his fantasy novel The Well of the Unicorn.

A man of overpowering personal charm, Hubbard became a member of Fletcher Pratt's wargame circle, which played a naval war game with balsa models of real warships on the scale of 55' = 1". The battleground was the Pratts' living-room floor until the crowd became too large; then they hired a hall on East 59 Street.

At these gatherings, Hubbard showed a bent for practical jokes. He gave widely varied impressions of himself. Some thought him a Fascist because of the authoritarian tone of certain stories. But one science-fiction writer, then an idealistic left-liberal, was convinced that Hubbard had profound liberal convictions. To others, Hubbard expressed withering disdain for politics and politicians, saying about the imminence of war: "Me, fight for a political system?'

HUBBARD WROTE FOR Unknown four of the five stories considered here. Three of them were "The "Ultimate Adventure" (April, 1939); "Slaves of Sleep" (July, 1939); and "The Case of the Friendly Corpse" (August, 1941).

In each of these novels, the protagonist starts out as an anti-hero: a weak, shy, timid, prissy, pedantic youth, sent by magic to another parallel world, where he is forced to become a roistering, swaggering adventurer. In each tale, the other "dimension" is vaguely Oriental. It is implied that its language is Arabic. But Hubbard knew nothing of that tongue; hence many names of the denizens of these imagined worlds are, Arabically speaking, impossible.

In "The Ultimate Adventure," Stephen Jepson, left a destitute orphan, is beguiled by a mad professor into visiting one of an infinite number of universes. Stevie is placed in an electric chair before a copy of The Arabian Nights, open to "The City of Brass." When the professor closes the switch, Stevie finds himself in the City of Brass itself. Exploring a tower, he unwittingly sounds a huge gong. Thereupon the comatose folk of the city awaken.

Escaping a gigantic ifrit or jinn, Stevie returns to the laboratory but is unwittingly sent back to the City of Brass, this time with a pistol. He is condemned to death as a suspected ghoul, shoots his way out, falls in with a gang of real ghouls who collect people's heads to eat, and rescues the rightful queen of the city from captivity in an ifrit's castle. When the wicked professor comes seeking treasure, Stevie turns the tables on him.

It's all good fun. This novel came out in paperback in 1970 from Berkley Medallion Books. It was combined in one volume with another of Hubbard's Unknown novellas, the psychiatric horror tale "Fear."

"Slaves of Sleep" is perhaps the best of the trio, with the most sustained power of imagination. It is the only one ('these stories, so far as I know, that has appeared alone in book form. It was published in cloth in 1948 by Shasta Publishers, with a charming jacket by the late Hannes Bok. More recently, Lancer Books issued it in paperback.

This time, the protagonist is a poor little rich boy, better heeled than Stevie Jepson but no more effectual. Jan Palmer, heir to a shipping fortune, ignores the business and moons about in a sailboat while crooked executives loot the shipping line.

Among Jan's heirlooms is a large copper jar, sealed with the Seal of Solomon. Another wicked professor sneaks into Jan's house and opens the jar. (Hubbard's contacts with academe evidently failed to give him a high opinion of it.) Out comes an ifrit imprisoned there by King Solomon. True to form, the ifrit kills the evil professor, curses Jan with eternal sleeplessness, and vanishes, leaving Jan to be accused of the professor's murder.

The first time that he goes to sleep in jail, Jan learns what the ifrit meant. Instead of ordinary dreams, Jan finds himself in a parallel world, where people form the lower caste and jann,2 the upper. The locale is much like the Barbary Coast of the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century. Jan inhabits the body of a sailor called "Tiger" - a roisterer with a passion for practical jokes. Thenceforward, Jan alternately awaits his trial in jail on the earth he knew and has madcap adventures in the alternate world. In time, the characters of Jan and Tiger merge, to the improvement of both.

It also transpires that other people whom Jan knew in his waking life - his aunt, the crooked executives, and the girl whom he timidly worships from afar - also have Dopplegänger in the world of sleep. With the help of a magical ring, which opens all bonds, Jan triumphs. The ring, however, is the main flaw in the story, because it makes Jan's victories look childishly easy. For instance, he beats a hostile navy by simply commanding the ships to fall apart. Where Robert E. Howard saved himself brain-racking labor in plotting by endowing his heroes with Herculean brawn, which got them out of all predicaments, Hubbard achieved the same end by providing them with invincible magical gadgets.

The third novella, "The Case of the Friendly Corpse," has some of the most original ideas and the funniest passages of any of Hubbard's stories, but it lets the reader down hardest at the end. Some of its plot elements were borrowed. In the 1930s, Dr. John D. Clark (who edited Howard's Conan stories for the original cloth-bound publication) and a friend named Mark Baldwin concocted a prospectus for an imaginary College of the Unholy Names. In a clever imitation of the usual deadly-dull style of such publications, they solemnly listed courses in the black arts, e.g. Advanced Thaumaturgy 112, Elementary and Advanced Transformations (Magic 56).... Delinquent students (e.g. those caught sleeping alone) were to be dropped - from Skelos Tower. ("Skelos" was borrowed from Howard.)

In 1941, Clark lent the typescript of this fabrication to Hubbard to use in a story. In the tale, Jules Riley is about to get. an advanced college degree and become an instructor in ancient languages-a fate that he (and presumably his creator) regards as a fate worse than death. At the crucial moment, Jules falls into another dimension. There he learns that his alter ego, a student at the College of the Unholy Names, has used his magic to swap bodies with Jules.

Fletcher Pratt and I had just finished our pre-war Harold Shea stories; "The Castle of Iron" had appeared in Unknown two issues earlier. Hubbard played a literary joke by having Harold appear before one of Jules's fellow students:

"He said he was a magician from another world [explains the student, who has been demonstrating a wand that turns into a super-serpent]. Well, I was just about to show the dean this double wand so I said this would be a good time to try it out and see if it really worked. I said I'd make a snake and then he'd rear up a monster and we'd see which one won. Well, he seemed kind of upset when I threw down the wand and it began to grow and he yelled some kind of chant that sounded like mathematics and the snake just kept on growing. I expected to see his monster any minute because he'd said he was a magician from another world and I figured he must be pretty good. But, by golly, the snake just grew up and then grabbed him up and ate him up before I could do anything about it." 3

Some fans were indignant at Hubbard's so brusquely bumping off a colleague's hero. Pratt and I thought of writing a story to rescue Harold from the serpent's maw and turn the tables, but after some floundering we gave it up. Another writer's mise en scene, we found, cramps the imagination so severely that fancy plods when it should soar. In the end, we ignored Hubbard and sent Harold on to other milieux.

The title of "The Case of the Friendly Corpse" comes from an incident wherein Jules is forced to bring a dead man back to life. He, however, gets the revivification spell mixed up with one for winning friends and influencing people. Hence the corpse, only half restored to life, is filled with demonstrative love for Jules, to the latter's unavailing horror.

It is a good, lively tale until the climax, which comprises a horrible example of deus ex machina. Jules, stripped of his magical powers and facing the vengeful host of sorcerers with a puny sword, overcomes them by simply renouncing magic and opting for the Christian God. Then his sword cuts through them and their monsters as through warm butter. To top it off, King Arthur and his knights, not mentioned before, gallop out of nowhere to chase the paynims away.

This ending is as incongruous as would be the finale of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls tacked on a novel by P. G. Wodehouse. Moreover, whereas some fantasy writers like T. H. White and C. S. Lewis, themselves devout Christians, can handle the Christian theme, the cynical Hubbard's exploitation of the Christian motif merely irks even the agnostic reader.

Hubbard also wrote a borderline swordplay-and-sorcery story, "Typewriter in the Sky," which ran as a two-part serial in Unknown, beginning with the issue of November, 1940. Mike de Wolf, aspirant pianist, visits the flat of Horace Hackett, hack writer, who is pounding out a yarn of piracy on the Spanish Main in 1640. Mike gets an accidental electric shock and finds himself living in Hackett's story. He is cast as the villain, the Spanish admiral Miguel de Lobo. Knowing what happens to Hackett's villains, Mike-Miguel uses frantic stratagems to outwit Hackett, the quasi-god of this world.

It is all good fun but not to be taken seriously. The synthetic world of Hackett's imagination has no magic; merely the careless anachronisms and inconsistencies, such as a Steinway piano, that Hackett puts into his story. When Hackett tears up a chapter and begins it over, Mike's situation instantly changes to match. Since the tinsel artificiality of the scene created by Hackett's mind is a basic assumption of "Typewriter," the reader is amused but not strongly engaged. At the end, Mike, back in his own body, muses:

Ah, yes. The fate. It was his luck to meet somebody in a story and then return without her. It was his luck. But you couldn't expect the breaks all the time. You couldn't ask luck to run your way forever. He had had her for a little while, in a land ruled by a typewriter in the clouds. And now he was out of that and there was no type-

Abruptly Mike de Wolf stopped. His jaw slackened a trifle and his hand went up to his mouth to cover
it. His eyes were fixed upon the fleecy clouds which scurried across the moon.

Up there-

God?

In a dirty bathrobe? 4

WHEN THE United States entered the Second World War, Hubbard was commissioned in the Naval Reserve and assigned to sea duty, first on anti-submarine craft and later on a cargo ship, the USS Algol. When Lieutenant Hubbard appeared in Philadelphia in the winter of 1944, the Heinleins, the Asimovs, and the de Camps made a night of it with him. I cannot blame him for showing slight vexation at my having half a stripe on him, since he had at least been at sea, while I had been navigating a desk. We were all fascinated when Hubbard turned the lights low, struck up Heinlein's guitar, and in a splendid voice sang Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest.

After the war, Hubbard lived for a while in California and resumed writing. His stories, as before, fell into two groups. One consisted of light, humorous tales of adventure, zest, full and amusing but carelessly thrown together. The other group was made up of more serious stories wherein the hero is a lonely leader, a solitary natural aristocrat who (like E. R. Eddison's heroes) has to kick the benighted common clods around for their own good.

Hubbard wrote for Astounding a series of fairly good stories about an immortal interplanetary physician, Doc Methuselah, who flies about the galaxy stopping plagues and toppling tyrants. Some medically trained readers took exception to Hubbard's medical ideas.

In 1950, after Dianetics had burst upon a vulnerable world, Hubbard wrote a sequel to "Slaves of Sleep". This was "The Masters of Sleep," which appeared in FANTASTIC ADVENTURES for October, 1950. Something goes awry with the original characters of "Slaves of Sleep." Jan Palmer, losing his double consciousness, reverts to his timid self in the waking world and to the foolishly reckless Tiger in the world of sleep. The same fate befalls his mate, ex-secretary Alice in the former world and dancing girl Wanna in the latter.

Again a marvelous talisman, the Two-World Diamond, appears to muddle and finally to solve Jan/Tiger's problems. Throughout, the diamond is being lost, found, stolen, and re-stolen. There are good scenes of naval action in the square-rigged, muzzle-loading, pike-and-cutlass era.

Alas for the story! Hubbard undertook not only to entertain the reader but also to further his Dianetics movement and to promote certain political causes, one of which was the Al-Can Highway. Moreover Hubbard, who had prided himself on being apolitical, had discovered the menace of Communism.

Hence Jan's waking world has two leading villains. One is a mad psychiatrist, Doctor Dyhard, who persists in rejecting Dianetics after all his abler colleagues have accepted it. He believes in prefrontal lobotomies for everyone and plots to get control of Jan for that purpose. The other scoundrel is a thieving lumberjack named Chan Davies, a member of the Friends of Russia Communist International Objectors Social Hall Lumberjacks Local No.261, with designs on the magical diamond. Older readers may recall that a left-wing science-fiction fan named "Chan" (for Chandler) Davis was then in the news.

This mixture of political and pseudo-scientific evangelism proved fictionally disastrous. Hubbard's psychiatrists and Communists are such puerile caricatures that, even if his premises were granted, his treatment would not persuade any but the weakest minds.

FROM THE LATE 1940s to date, Hubbard's own saga is as fantastic as anything be ever put into his stories. For a while he was in a business partnership with John W. Parsons, an explosives engineer and occultist.

Parsons's life is a story by itself His cult began in the 1930s as a branch of the Order of Oriental Templars of Aleister Crowley 5, self-styled "wickedest man in the world" - occultist, poet, big-game hunter, drug addict, dope peddler, bisexual satyr, and professional screwball. Members of the Los Angeles branch of the O.T.O. met in the mansion of a magnate. They entered a secret meeting room by means of a trapdoor and a ladder. There a gauze-clad priestess of the cult climbed out of a coffin to perform the mystic rites. My colleagues Tony Boucher and Jack Williamson, who attended one of the meetings, reported that it was respectable to the point of dullness, unless one shuddered over the cult's laborious blasphemies.

As I understand it, the theory of the cult leader - a Briton named Wilfred Smith - was that the world was too much run by extroverts. Therefore he proposed to get all the introverts together and organize them (as if introverts could be assembled and organized) into a conspiracy to seize control from the extroverts. Soon, however, the priestess died. Smith eloped with Parsons's wife and, with one thing and another, the cult became inactive.

After the Second World War, Parsons revived the cult in an old mansion in Pasadena. But, when the rites called for a naked pregnant woman to leap nine times through a sacred fire on the lawn, neighbors called the police. In 1952, Parsons perished when he dropped a bottle of picric add on the floor of his laboratory.

Hubbard's partnership with Parsons had ended a few years earlier under acerbic conditions. Then came the Dianetics/Scientology movement.

Several people have written on this movement in detail; their books are listed in the notes. 6 A prudent man, however, approaches these events with caution. More than one author has complained of harassment from outraged Scientologists by abusive letters and threatening telephone calls. George Malko, who rashly devoted a whole book to Scientology, has been subjected to a lawsuit for six million dollars.

This was but one of a large number of libel suits filed by Scientologists in recent years. Defendants include the American Medical Association, the Washington Post, and The Times of London. When they sued Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, for a million and a half, she sued them right back for 15.4 million. 7 While, so far as I know, none of these suits has ever come to trial, they effectively discourage the publication of views unsympathetic to Hubbard and his followers.

In Astounding for May, 1950, appeared an article by Hubbard, "Dianetics, the Evolution of a Science." This told of Hubbard's new system of psychotherapy and the radical theories by which he explained its effects. This article was followed by the book Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health. The book opens with claim: "The creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch." Hubbard averred that his system of therapy would cure all mental and most physical ills, making the subject a "clear" - a kind of superman. 8

Whereas Hubbard's fictional style was always fluent, literate, and readable, his non-fiction proved incomprehensible - at least to me. A possible reason for this use of obscure language was expressed by W. S. Gilbert:

And every one will say
As you walk your mystic way,

If this young man expresses himself in
terms too deep for me,

Why, what a very singularly deep
young man this deep young
man must be! 9

IN Dianetics, HUBBARD started with the concept of an "engram." This term, invented by the German psychoanalyst Richard Semon early in this century, means a permanent impression left on protoplasm by a stimulus. For instance, said Hubbard, all sorts of haritiftil engrams are impressed on a human fetus during gestation as the mother is raped, kicked, or beaten by her husband, or as she attempts abortion by knitting needles. All these events, the book implies, are normal in average married life.

Associated with Hubbard in the Dianetics movement were John W. Campbell and Dr. Joseph A. Winter, a physician specializing in endocrinology and psychosomatic medicine. Together they set up a Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Campbell, a brilliant man with a scientific education who became the greatest of all science-fiction magazine editors, had found active scientific research uncongenial and had made writing and editing his career. One can only speculate why, for many years, he lent himself to one unscientific or borderline idea after another. I suspect that. failing to become a famous scientist himself, he harbored the ambition to be at least the discoverer of such a scientist.

The book Dianetics became a best seller despite the fact that psychologists, psychiatrists and other medical men heatedly denounced it as "amateurish and potentially dangerous meddling with serious mental problems." 10Time and Newsweek described Dianetics as "the poor man's psychoanalysis," since the Dianetic system of auditing superficially resembles Freudian psychoanalysis.

After a year of nationwide expansion and controversy, the Dianetic movement fell on hard times. Heresies and schisms arose. Lurid accusations were exchanged. Branches seceded. Doctor Winter broke with Hubbard in 1950; Campbell disavowed Dianetics in 1951; the Research Foundation in Elizabeth disappeared.

Hubbard moved to Wichita, where he set up a second foundation with a local businessman, Don Purcell, as partner. Hubbard had shed his first wife and married Sara Northrup, who had been a friend of Parsons. In 1951, Sara divorced Hubbard. 11

In 1952, the foundation in Wichita suffered financial reverses and was bought up by Purcell, whereupon he and Hubbard parted with recriminations. As his third wife, Hubbard chose Mary Sue Whipp, who has ever since taken an active role in his enterprises. Moving to Arizona, Hubbard propounded the more advanced doctrine of Scientology, based among other things on doctrines of reincarnation and the extraterrestrial origin of man. Revelation followed revelation, until Scientology made Dianetics look drab by comparison. A magazine summarized these teachings thus:

Everyone, it seems, is 74 trillion years old, and has been reincarnated over & over in cycles ("spirals"), which have been getting shorter as evolution has speeded up. The current spiral began a mere 35,000 years ago. Everyone has a "theta being," which represents his essential thought-energy and becomes associated with a "MEST" body (another Hubword made from the initials of matter, energy, space, time). . . . If a subject has a pain in his jaw, it may he that in an earlier spiral he was a clam. If this pain is associated with fear of falling, he must have been a clam that was picked up by a bird and dropped on the rocks. 12

Extending his operations to the United Kingdom, Hubbard set up his new movement on a tighter basis than the old. He claimed that he had written a book, Excalibur, but that when four of the first fifteen persons who read it went insane, he humanely withdrew it from circulation.

For a time, Hubbard manifested himself in Saint Hill, an English mansion once owned by a maharaja. Here, at tea time, he had a butler serve him a Coca-Cola on a silver tray. He also castigated the psychiatrists who had received Dianetics with less than enthusiasm. In a magazine article, he wrote:

If you point out something you don't like to a psychiatrist he promptly puts you on his list as insane and calls up his contacts in the police department and military intelligence to have you raided or arrested as a dangerous agitator. . . . He knows he can do nothing to really help and can only make somebody quiet. He is operating on a failed purpose to help others. And it makes him savage and morose. He even doubts his own sanity and often winds up completely mad in his own institutions. . . . If psychiatry had paid attention to its ethics of practice and had organized to prevent wild malpractice, it would not today be so vulnerable to attack. Documented orgies in sanitariums, sexual interference with patients to say nothing of the beatings, torturings and murders which have now come to light are all indications of what can happen when practice is not guided along decent and humane lines by professional ethics. 13

In the 1960s, Hubbard converted his movement into the Church of Scientology, thus securing the protection (in the United States) of the First Amendment against governmental interference and gaining tax exemptions. Scientology fought the Food and Drug Administration to a standstill over the use of the so-called E-meter (electropsychometer). This device, used in Scientological interviews, resembles a drastically simplified polygraph or lie detector. It is made of a pair of tin cans, a galvanometer, and
some wires. Hubbard released photographs of himself using the E-meter on a tomato, claiming that he was thus put en rapport with the tomatovian mind. 14

In 1971, Federal District Judge Gesell held that, while the gadget looked to him like "quackery," its use was still protected as a religious rite by the First Amendment. Hence the FDA was ordered to return the confiscated E-meters.15

Over the years, Scientology has grown in size and. influence to a degree that some find alarming. Hubbard has been declared persona non grata in several countries. 16 At last accounts, he was cruising the Mediterranean in his "Sea Org," a fleet of five small commercial and naval craft converted into yachts, and keeping tabs on his followers by a corps of uniformed "ethics officers." He is thought by some to become immensely rich. While none but he knows the details of his finances, his enterprises have obviously not impoverished him.

AS A WRITER, Hubbard had some of Robert E. Howard's gifts: a natural bent for storytelling; a fine sense of pace, color, and action; and, more than Howard, an ebullient sense of humor. One must admit that, whatever their faults, few stories furnish more pure fun than some of Hubbard's Unknown novels.

Hubbard also suffered from Howard's faults of slapdash haste and carelessness, which clutter his tales with damaging crudities and inconsistencies like those of his character Horace Hackett. If he had taken more time and trouble. . . But then he would been somebody else, with different faults and virtues. And those who have made Scientology into a formidable Church Militant would have had to seek their transcendental wisdom elsewhere.